When the whole goal is half

One of Istanbul’s half marathons was a couple weeks ago, and I made it a goal to participate. Again, I’m not going to pretend I was going to run the whole thing, but I intended to finish. My No. 1 goal was not to die. I felt I met that one, although once I got home I swigged Airborne after a cup of hot chocolate. It was 55 (tops) and cloudy and windy. Just awful weather in which to be outside. I felt worse on this one from the get-go than any of these yet. Getting minimal sleep the night before didn't help. But I did it! 

 

I got home and soaked in a hot bath with a cup of hot chocolate.

BUT my ultimate goal was do it in under 2:45, and I came in at 2:42:48 so I'm thrilled. The bad thing for the competitor in me if that since I felt so awful and the weather was terrible, I know I can do better. I do NOT need to do another of these things. 

Usually, I can run about 2km before needing to walk. Last race, I went 3k before needing to catch my breath. This time, I barely made it to the 1k mark and I started doing this pattern of once I hit a marker, I'd run until whatever song was on ended, then walk (briskly) for an entire song, then run. That worked pretty well. My walk, seriously, is not slower than my jog. A couple of places the markers were on a slope so I kept going, but once I got to the 20 I had to pull up mid-song. It finished on a slight incline and I had to walk from the 300 to the 200 meter mark; couldn't even turn it on at the end, which I usually do. Going to sit down after it, I almost fell over. I sat down next to some other lady, and I noticed she almost fell over when she stood up.

And Big Brother being what it is, as soon as I sat down I got a text with my time on it. That's scary.

 

But I made it! I am so relieved to have finished it. I know I could do better, because I hadn’t been “training” much since I’m still doing physical therapy on the shoulder.

Yeah, that’s not fun. First, it irritates me to pay someone to watch me lift weights, the same weightlifting I would be doing in the gym if I wasn’t in the physical therapy place. I’m just tired of it.

I’m also concerned it’s not working because the same movements hurt of just feel weird. I had a follow-up appointment, though, and the surgeon assures me it’s OK. He also suggested swimming, which was good since I started doing that the day before he said I could.

It gives a different type of resistance, so that’s good. He told me to do the over-the-shoulder swim method, which I never do and now I don’t like doing it because it hurts! I’ve been trying to experiment with stretches  and holy cow, I have done something twice that has caused more pain than I can ever remember being in.

One happened when I was doing some kind of butterfly-ish backstroke. I held my hands together at the top of my head to stretch and I swear, I felt stuff rip. Apparently, this is what was supposed to happen but man, it hurt.

Yesterday, in another move, something like that happened again. You know what it sounds like when you pull up a weed that has a bunch of little roots? That’s the sound.  It hurt so bad I screamed, but once it was over, the pain stopped. However, I was not even remotely tempted to try that move again. I just could not believe the pain.

I guess is normal. I’m supposed to go back to the surgeon in another week for another checkup.

In other news, I’m down to about two months here and am trying to get started on the get-ready-to-move process. Trying to sell my car. It's a POS and the odds of selling it in the consulate are slim since I am departing before most people arrive. Per the customs guy's suggestion, I listed it on what's basically Istanbul's Craigs List.

Oh my. Ad in English, specify it's diplomat-owned and owner needs to be eligible for duty-free purchase. Specify I'm a foreigner and don't speak Turkish. 

My phone has run off the hook. Not a one speaks English. At work, a friend helped me but they continued until 11:30 last night --- I stopped answering them. It is a nightmare. For those who grab, for example, a broken English-speaking uncle and ask me details of the sale, I don't know since that's why I put the "diplomat-owned" and "must be eligible for duty-free purchase in it." If you are not one of these, I cannot explain what you can do, as I have no clue.

The customs guy sent me a paragraph in Turkish explaining who's eligible so I've Whatsapped it, and I've sent pictures to many. (One guy, who spoke zero English, called me baby and, after sending 14 photos of the car to him, he responded "picture yourself?" I blocked him.)

I've had Google Translate open and I've tried to answer questions, but I just don't understand some of it. And when I run "I don't understand, please call tomorrow so someone can help translate" into Google and run it back, they follow up with more questions in Turkish.

I have no idea how this will go down. In the two weeks or so I’ve had it listed, I’ve probably had 200 calls/texts or emails. I guess only blocking three of them so far isn’t such a bad track record.

A nice prelude to Easter!

Last week, I took a tour to the three Baltic states. It’d been planned for awhile, as I wanted to take off one more week before departing Istanbul. I usually try to go somewhere for my birthday but couldn’t swing that week. I have a project I work that eats up April and May, and since I leave at the end of June, it seemed like the last week in March would be perfect. When I planned it, I had no realization that Easter would be on April 1, the day the tour ended and I’d head home, but it was available for the Baltics, my preferred destination.

The other thing I hadn’t realized was how dang cold it would be there at the time. This dawned on me months before I left, but certainly had no impact on booking the tour. The silly thing was, the “Stans” are also on my list but I was pretty sure they’d be too cold. So although I considered weather when booking, I didn’t consider it enough.

Still, I did fine in packing. Three pairs of pants (one lined Redhead pair of jeans, the other two LL Bean), one pair of long johns courtesy of Eddie Bauer, three LS button-down shirts and three LS T-shirt-ish shirts, plus the wonderful LL Bean coat I got for living in North Dakota. Normally, I don’t pack more than a pair of shoes but threw in boots at the last minute (also LL). Debated the snow boots but am glad I didn’t opt for that. Was fine with the clothes, plus the hat, gloves, scarf and whatever those things are that are wide tubes of fabric you can use as hats, scarves or what-have-you. I got on in Helsinki and it was perfect.

We met in Vilnius, which I still cannot say, in Lithuania, which I still have trouble spelling. I’d researched airport transport before, which was pretty much the extent of my research for the trip, and paid a whole euro to get from the airport almost directly in front of the Radisson Blu we were meeting at.

The tour, run by Baltic Visions, was perfect for what I was looking for. I missed the get-together the evening before because my flight was a little later than everyone else’s; they all had long journeys. We only had nine people because it was basically offseason, so that was cool. There were three singles, me, a guy from Brisbane, Australia; a stereotypical New Yorker I had my fill of by Thursday; a young Australian couple from Canberra; an older Irish couple from Dublin and a mother-and-daughter from Germany. The daughter was older than me, and the mom didn’t speak English, but everyone else did. I can’t imagine flying from Australia for just one week anywhere; the couple had gone something like Canberra-Perth-Doha-somewhere else – Vilnius. The single guy, who was a physical therapist, was traveling in the region for the following week, so that wasn’t so bad. But boy, that is a long, long way to go for a week.

The routing was Vilnius-Riga-Tallinn with a couple of sightseeing stops on the travel days. It was nice to be in Christian countries around Easter, and I was able to go into churches celebrating Easter. I couldn’t understand a word, but I spent the night before Easter in some cathedrals listening to music, seeing weird rituals (a priest going through the standing crowd – no chairs – chanting and waving smoke at people) – and just being at peace.

My favorite stop, which I had no idea about before I booked the trip, is this site in northern (I think) Lithuania called the Hill of Crosses.

Here’s a link to the history of it: https://sacredsites.com/europe/lithuania/hill_of_crosses.html

“The tradition of placing crosses dates from [the 1200s] and probably first arose as a symbol of Lithuanian defiance of foreign invaders. Since the medieval period, the Hill of Crosses has represented the peaceful resistance of Lithuanian Catholicism to oppression. “

In case the name wasn’t clear enough, it’s literally a hill that is filled with crosses people have put up. And by “crosses,” I mean thousands upon thousands. One university class attempted to count them but stopped when they hit 100k. In a small area, there might be one big cross that has smaller crosses and rosaries hanging off the T part and then scores of smaller ones planted at the base. It’s a combination of spiritual, peaceful, eerie with a good dose of “wait, isn’t this just litter?” thrown in.

It’s a little walk off the highway, and you go under an overpass to get there. On the parking side of the overpass, there are several booths where you can pay 1E for a little cross, maybe six inches high, with a spear to spike it in the dirt. As you walk through the site, you can see them starting to decompose when you look closely at the bottom layer.

Stuff made of wood was big in the Baltics; driving through, it’s forest upon forest. Stupidly, I did NOT buy a cross at the Hill of Crosses. They had the little cheap ones to plant, sure, but I didn’t want that. I collect nice ones but I have to also like them. It’s not like “Oh, I’m here; I need a cross so let me just grab … this one.” I have to like it, and the only one I saw there was pretty dang expensive, so I didn’t buy it, reasoning that since there was wood stuff everywhere, I’d eventually find one. No. Oh well.

Still, it was my favorite part of the tour, even though it was basically just a 30-minute stop. A very good place to just stop and reflect.